Like Jarndyce v Jarndyce, the case of David Shayler v MI5 'still drags its dreary length before the court, perennially hopeless'. It may not yet match Dickens's 'scarecrow of a suit [which] has, in course of time, become so complicated that no man alive knows what it means', but give the secret police time.

A summary of the scarecrow suits generated by MI5's determination to shut him up and frighten others into silence, begins in 1997 when Shayler went to the Mail on Sunday with his account of a half-witted secret state. He fled into exile after publication and was held in a Parisian jail on the request of the British authorities. French judges decided he was a political prisoner. They refused to extradite him, but Shayler returned to Britain voluntarily where he was charged with breaking the Official Secrets Act. Shayler countered with the claim that blanket official secrecy was incompatible with the Human Rights Act's protection of freedom of speech. His case has been heard by the High Court and Court of Appeal and goes to the Law Lords in February.

Annie Machon, Shayler's girlfriend, was stopped at Gatwick by a squad of Special Branch goons a few weeks after the story was published. They trashed the London flat she shared with Shayler and impounded her love letters and several pairs of knickers as threats to national security. Shayler's brother has been harassed by the police. The Observer and Guardian were prosecuted last year for refusing to hand over notes the state alleged we had of conversations with Shayler. Punch was put in the dock for publishing a piece on MI5's cack-handed failure to prevent IRA bombings. Julie Ann Davies, a student at Kingston University and supporter of Shayler's cause, was dragged from a lecture last year. She is now suing for wrongful arrest. Shayler, meanwhile, is threatening to sue the Sunday Telegraph which, with the vicarious blood lust of the mimsy scribbler, once drooled about the possibility of MI5 assassinating its former agent.

Shayler and Machon are standing up well in the blizzard of writs. They live, courtesy of the Mail on Sunday , in an Art Deco flat in central London which estate agents would doubtless describe as exclusive and desirable. The newspaper's money runs out in January. They have no idea where they will go, but remain cheerful.

As Dickens knew, many who are caught in litigation go mad. Shayler has a verbal tic of 'I'm not a conspiracy theorist but...' Apart from that he gives every sign of remaining level-headed. Inevitably, however, he is stuck in the past. The forthcoming trials and hearings will have to look at his descriptions of security services blunders which are passing into history: the files that the far-Right fantasists in MI5 had open as late as 1997 on such noted subversives as Harriet Harman, Peter Mandelson and Jack Straw; the plot by MI6 officers to finance a coup by Libyan Islamic fundamentalists against Colonel Gadaffi in 1996; the failure to act on intelligence which might have stopped an IRA bombing in 1993 and an attack on the Israeli Embassy in 1994, for which two probably innocent Palestinians were jailed.

Shayler and the courts have to be obsessed with the detail. But why should anyone else care?

What didn't happen after 11 September was only slightly less stunning than what did. The failure to predict, let alone prevent, the suicide bombings in no way shortened the careers of the heads of the American security services. George Tenet, the director of the CIA, and Robert Mueller, the director of the FBI, remained trusted and in post. Last year Sir Richard Dearlove, the head of MI6, and MI5's Sir Stephen Lander argued that London was the 'terrorist capital of the world' as they persuaded the Government to pass ludicrously broad anti-terrorism legislation. If their claims weren't self-serving guff, they might have been expected to pick up a hint of what was about to hit the World Trade Centre. Rather than doubting them, Tony Blair gushed that 'the Government and the British people are fortunate to be served by security and intelligence organisations whose pro fessionalism is admired - and by our enemies feared - throughout the world.'

The extent of the fear the security services provokes in the souks is debatable. MI5 responded to 11 September by lobbying for the reintroduction of internment. The FBI held 1,000 foreigners incommunicado. The trampling of civil liberties and the rule of law may seem necessary to the uninitiated. Al-Qaeda has, after all, proved that no crime is unimaginable. Unfortunately, internment is the worst possible defence.

A few weeks ago, eight retired executives of the FBI whom no one can accuse of lily-livered civil libertarianism, condemned the tactics of the US government. Dumping suspects in the slammer may make the credulous believe that something is being done. But on the rare occasions the guilty are locked up, premature arrest tips off other members of a cell and leaves them free to regroup. William H. Webster, a former FBI director, said the intelligent strategy was long-term investigation 'so when you roll-up the cell, you know you've got the whole group.'

Shayler agreed that internment was an acknowledged joke in MI5. All the young officers recruited after the Cold War knew it had been a disaster in Northern Ireland and during the Gulf War, he told me.

If this sounds like the gripings of a renegade, it is worth remembering that Shayler is a peculiar 'traitor'. He wasn't driven into opposition because he was a secret Marxist, like the Cambridge spies, or because he was appalled by MI5's bugging of legitimate political organisations, like Cathy Massiter. He was in revolt against a bungling management. From him we know that warnings of attacks were missed and that MI6 officers were happy to see an Islamic regime in Libya, bin Laden notwithstanding.

Given that the 'war' against terrorism is an intelligence war, it is frankly terrifying that the Government won't listen to him. Parliament's Intelligence and Security Committee proved its pointlessness by refusing to give Shayler a hearing. A Cabinet Office review of the security services by John Malpass, a former spook, wouldn't call Shayler as a witness on the surreal grounds that any evidence he gave the Government would breach an injunction the Government itself had obtained to silence him.

Reform of the security services has been indefinitely postponed and the energy of Ministers dissipated on ever more draconian and irrelevant laws. New Labour's unwillingness to examine the quality of intelligence begs the question, what will happen if 11 September isn't a one-off and Britain is attacked? On current form it appears the Government would rather introduce martial law than consider for a moment that the security services may not be the most admired - and feared - in the world.

The hollow ring of empty rhetoric

The most alarming sight at this year's Labour Party conference was the spectacle of platoons of pinkish hacks believing Tony Blair. When he cried that the 'state of Africa is a scar on the conscience of the world', their mouths were agape and they all but swooned.

Now that Blair has overruled Clare Short and Gordon Brown and decided that Tanzania should waste its debt relief on a superfluous and overpriced military air traffic control system, his disillusioned fans are accusing the PM of nauseating hypocrisy.

And, indeed, the Tanzanian decision was a bit of a stunner, even for hardened cynics. We'd thought that Blair's pledges to take the wretched of the earth out of poverty would be sabotaged in the White House, not Downing Street.

But as fairness to the PM is written into this notebook's mission statement, I must point out that the carpers weren't paying attention in Brighton. Africa would be saved, Blair said, not by listening to the confused anti-globalisation protesters but by providing 'more aid, untied to trade'. Clearly, the two million children in Tanzania who receive no primary education are not an exciting trading proposition. They need teachers, textbooks and pencils - and no one made a fortune supplying those. Similarly, the 500 children who die each day require clean water and rudimentary medicines which, again, are not commodities which set the global market buzzing.

Far better to encourage serious trade by insisting that Tanzania takes a system which is four times more expensive than its rivals and allowing Barclays to facilitate the deal with interest charges way above the rates offered by the World Bank.

If there is a criticism of Blair, it is that he hasn't gone far enough. As Tanzania will have near insuperable difficulties maintaining and operating the hi-tech equipment, it would be kinder for the PM to order Short and Brown to cut out the middleman and send aid meant for the Third World direct to BAe. British jobs would be guaranteed and Dar es Salaam would be spared the expense of paying for years of advice from BAe consultants. Not giving money to Tanzania is, in these circumstances, true charity.

Meanwhile, Blair's detractors must realise that his promises are the rhetorical equivalent of pornography. They are usually tedious, occasionally uplifting, but only fools confuse them with the real thing.